Surviving to 2030 Means Thriving, Not Just Getting By
I ranked the top 50 cryptos by their chances of surviving until 2030. To me, in human life as well as in crypto, it's not about just getting by and staying alive. Especially in crypto, some of these projects can continue for a while — but really surviving is more about thriving. Is my project doing better in 2030 than it is today? With that metric in mind, I've got a deep, fifty-some-page research report to go into all of this with you.
The executive summary, as usual, is that to me, ICP out of these top 50 coins is in the best position to be absolutely thriving in 2030 — where everything has gotten better, all kinds of metrics are up, and the technology has advanced. Now, I'll acknowledge that Bitcoin, Ethereum, Chainlink, and Solana have a very good chance of still being around, maybe even having some growth since 2026. But a lot of these other projects are in serious trouble. Their chances of surviving to 2030 — the blockchain even still being active then — look very questionable. And even if the blockchain is active, the user numbers are going to be lower then than they are now.
So let's dive into this report. Number one: I got scores for all of these, and ICP gets a 91 out of 100. This is an active research report I prepared with ChatGPT Pro, which is the highest level of AI research I can access currently, and it's some fantastic information. I prompted it that I wanted a growth-weighted definition of survival — being more useful and more used in 2030 than today — and Internet Computer ranks first. Now, ChatGPT thinks Bitcoin still has the strongest plain odds of merely continuing to operate. But continuing to operate is much different. There are a lot of us, a lot of people, who continue to operate — but are they really surviving? Are they having a life worth living? To me, the point of being here is that your life is really worth living and enjoyable. That's what's worth surviving for, not just counting how many days you can get.
So this report will be really helpful. The full report is available in my Skool community — join the Jerry Banfield Family and you'll find it there. I'm also using AI to build out a website marketplace on jerrybanfield.com, which I think you'll be interested to see as well.
What If Crypto Prices Never Move Again?
Here's how to use this report. One of the main things you should be thinking about is: what happens if crypto prices don't fundamentally move in the next few years? Almost everyone is assuming there's going to be another euphoric bull market and the prices are all going to go up. But if you look over the last four years, prices — while there were certainly some ups — have trended down overall in most places. Bitcoin certainly had a new all-time high, but a lot of projects in the last five years did not reach their 2021 high again. There were brief spikes.
So the realistic question we should be asking in crypto at this point is: will your project survive if the price never goes up? If the price never moves again, if any ideas of a new all-time high are gone, will your project still be here? And what if your project's price keeps, on average, dumping over the next four years — is it going to be around? To me, ICP is the unquestionable yes to that. Can Bitcoin still survive at $60,000 or $50,000 or $40,000 or $30,000 over the next four years? Probably. Can Ethereum continue to puddle around, putz around in the thousands, even if the price went down? Probably. But some of these have a much worse case.
The Most Important Conclusions
ICP wins this test — not every possible test — because ICP has the broadest non-trading application surface. That means it has the biggest real-world use case of all of these, and it's a direct computation and storage resource-burn economy. But the adoption base is still small, and the execution risk is still real. The adoption base could change overnight, though. There are non-disclosure agreements signed, there are governments involved — ICP could go from seeming to have low adoption to having the biggest real-world adoption in crypto. That could happen relatively overnight, if these things that are building end up manifesting. Or it could just continue to go up consistently, whereas most of crypto's adoption actually drops — you have a bull market peak, and then it often just drops the whole time until another bull market peak.
Yes, Bitcoin wins the simpler "will it exist" question. It's been around 17 years at this point, and it's very probable it'll still be around in four more years. But the base layer functionality may not be dramatically broader. And I don't want to invest in something where the base layer functionality is just going to be about the same in 2030 as it is today. That's not a strong investment case to me. I'm looking for asymmetric wins — things that are undervalued that could go crazy. I'm not looking for "is this still going to be around, and maybe it'll keep being used about the same in four years."
Ethereum does continue to remain a proven programmable economy, but the L2 fragmentation complicates the price action. Ethereum has a very strong brand, but more and more of the actual revenue has been going off of Ethereum, and that's been diluting the value flowing to the actual Ethereum token.
Then there's a bunch of coins that have a useful product with a weak token. This is a very important nuance to understand in crypto. With Ondo and Morpho, the software financial product can grow without the customers really needing the governance token — without the price really appreciating. Then a token that's necessary can still power a weak end market, like MemeCore and some of the exchange chains: their native tokens are used for gas, but the token doesn't manufacture outside demand.
And then, yes — no crypto has a guaranteed floor price. ICP to me has the strongest case for a floor price, based on being able to sell computation on the blockchain and storage. To me, that's one of the best cases for a floor price. But none of these cryptos have a real floor price. Even Bitcoin and Ethereum could go down depending on exactly how narratives are spun and what happens. Bitcoin could go below $10,000 again. Ethereum could go back into the hundreds like it did in 2022. These cryptos have huge possible downsides, so to me the question is: which ones have upsides that match? ICP could go to zero — it's already at all-time lows — but it has a huge possible upside, whereas with Bitcoin, you're never getting to a million dollars at the rate it's going today. Never — not in 50 years — unless the currency is just hyperinflated, and then there's probably going to be more in Bitcoin anyway. And there's wallet risk stacked on top of all of this too, which maybe we'll cover at the end. I'll try to keep all of this reasonably brief.
The Executive Verdict and the Scores
So here's the executive verdict with all the scores. Internet Computer: 91. ChatGPT came up with these scores — I didn't tell it exactly how to rank everything. I just said I want you to consider what could be doing better in 2030 than today, and also to penalize heavily if there's a good chance the project dies by 2030, which you'll see with some at the bottom. I'm surprised how high it ranked Canton near the top — I disagree with that one the most. And Chainlink, to me, has a high token value-capture problem. But I definitely agree with Ethereum being up here and Bitcoin being up here, which is interesting. It knocked Bitcoin seven points below Ethereum, though, and it puts Solana above Bitcoin. So I don't know — that's very interesting to me.
Then you see how these start to seriously fall off going down. It has Aave at 82 and TON at 80. Consider the distance from even TON up to Ethereum or ICP. What you're starting to do here in your calculations is consider risk multipliers. When something's got a high price and a significant risk of downside, you've got to count that against any possible returns and essentially multiply it. For example, if you buy a meme coin and the odds of it going to zero are 99% and the odds of a 100X are 1%, you're effectively doing nothing, because 99% of the time you're going to lose everything, and the 100X that would cover those losses is only happening 1% of the time. Really, investing is much more complicated than that — but not a lot of people ever talk this way, so I'm guessing a lot of people don't think this way. You should be thinking in multiplicative risk: probability of risk versus rewards across distributions of probabilities of rewards.
For me, I'd say there's at least, pessimistically, a 10% — if not a 20% or 30% — chance of ICP 100Xing. Whereas I would say there's only about a 10% or 20% chance of ICP going to zero. In that case, your average outcome is closer to a 50X. If you go to zero, you lost everything — but to me it's the same probability, if not higher, of 100Xing. These scores are kind of getting at this a little bit. One data point in here: SUI, down at 78, gets called one of the best young layer-one improvement candidates, but a low market-cap-to-fully-diluted ratio means adoption must outrun dilution, which is really hard. Monero is pretty strong — the inflation is solid, and the price action has been really good on Monero over time, consistently up.
The Top 15 Most Likely to Be Stronger in 2030
So here's the top 15 by probability of being fundamentally stronger in 2030. And to me, you also want to consider the price action that could go along with these. If the odds of ICP being stronger in 2030 are very high and the current market cap for ICP is extremely low, that's an asymmetric opportunity. If Ethereum is fundamentally stronger in 2030, the price is probably not going to be more than two or three times as high as it is right now, at most. Comparing one and two on this list, they looked similar in terms of being stronger in 2030 — and I would argue this is a little optimistic for these other ones, especially because the longer ICP survives and gets real adoption, the more all the other ones stand to lose as well.
Next on the list is Chainlink, then Canton, Solana, Bitcoin, Aave, TON, XMR, Sui, and Uniswap — I'd probably have to disagree with that last one more than some of the others, though it's a 77. Then XLM — I'm surprised, for all the XLM hypers, that it ranked XLM over XRP, which is interesting, and it explains its reasons. Then HBAR, with AVAX and NEAR falling down here at 73. We'll go into all of them in a little bit.
Let's look at some more of the methodology: why ICP ranks first while Bitcoin may be the safest survivor. To me, life is not just about safety. It's not just about being alive versus dead — because I've personally come to know eternal life.
Survival Is Guaranteed — Thriving Is the Question
In my experience, as soon as I'm not possessing and focusing on this body, I'm somewhere else, in some other body, doing some other thing. So to me, survival is guaranteed — but I'm not just looking to get by and get to the highest age possible. I'm asking: is my life getting better, getting more interesting, staying fun, staying worth living? That's the framework I put this report in. This is not strictly just "will the network still be operating."
Bitcoin has the strongest history, but that doesn't mean it has the strongest answer. To put that in human context: I've been here 42 years on Earth, and my kids have been here 11 and 8 years respectively. But statistically, my kids have a higher probability of being here four, five, six years from now than I do, even though I've been here 42 years. And while blockchains age a bit differently than people, blockchain age still should not just be weighed as "well, it's been here 17 years, so it'll definitely be here in four more." If the quantum computing scaremongering is accurate, Bitcoin could be destroyed by quantum computing and gone in 2030. You could have forks and relics — Bitcoin really could be destroyed and gone by 2030. That is a possibility. So I don't agree with ChatGPT that Bitcoin is the strongest answer just in terms of survival, either. Now, I like that this report balances its research with my opinion, so you get a little more reasonable version of things.
Some of you saw that last video I made, about 30 lame coins that will wreck your portfolio. I guess the over-the-top comedy is not your thing — I think I'll just sell that comedy as MP3 downloads on my website instead.
Will the Network Be More Useful and Used in 2030?
So: is the network likely to be more useful and more used in 2030 than it is today? To me, this is the most important answer. ICP gets penalized on this one because of its user adoption and branding currently. However, if what we're seeing with ICP — the usage, the AI, the cloud engines — changes, ICP goes up dramatically. ICP and Ethereum are very close together here, because Ethereum has the branding and ICP has the technology.
The ICP demand loop is unique. I'm literally building a new version of my website right now — I just spun up another canister, and I'm building a business, my own version of Shopify, directly on ICP with AI. So I'm going to be able to demonstrate this even better. And I spend ICP to pay my web hosting bill. ICP has the best chance in the top 50 of being fundamentally more useful in 2030 than it is today. That, to me, is the key takeaway from all of this.
Now, I'm an ICP maxi — that's all I have. And I've held most of these other coins, at least half of them, and I sold them for ICP, because this is what I'm looking at: I want the best chance of being in an undervalued coin that has the best odds of being fundamentally more useful than it is today. This is not financial advice — this is the research behind my thinking. To me, this is the cutting edge of crypto research happening right now: combining AI with my 12 years in crypto and researching what has to be thousands of altcoins at this point. This is something I hope gives you a lot of value. And if you appreciate it, go to jerrybanfield.com and check out everything I've got for you there.
How the Scoring Worked
The way this was scored: I had ChatGPT drop all the stablecoins and then weigh everything else. It came up with the weights based on what I said. The core test here is: does this system solve something useful when token prices stop moving? This is one of the most important things you should think about for any project you're holding. Is the addressable problem likely to matter more by 2030? That's where ICP has the strongest answer — and where ICP consumes everybody else's answer. Anything you're saying about Bitcoin or Ethereum strictly outside of branding — we need programmable money, we need smart contracts — well, ICP can do all of that better. If you want a new financial system, ICP does that better than anything else.
Then: can the network deliver its promise meaningfully differently or cheaper than similar alternatives? ICP is very strong here, while Bitcoin and Ethereum are strong on the branding side of this one. Then you've got value capture — would the product still work if the token disappeared? And ICP gets penalized on "are there real users, developers, and integrations," because it's still difficult to find a whole bunch of abundant evidence on that outside of the sheer quantity of transactions, which is more than any other blockchain. And then: can the protocol remain secure and govern itself through tax regulations, declining subsidies, and organizational failure? This is where a lot of projects lose points, because many of these projects totally depend on subsidies, not on the actual tech at all. Finally: is the usage likely to be higher in four years? ICP is really strong on that one. Those criteria are what produced the tier definitions.
The Complete Ranking
Now let's look into the complete ranking and keep going down. BNB is here at 73. Hyperliquid is down at 72 — and for all the hype bulls, consider the difference in safety, the odds of survival to 2030. Hyperliquid has blown up pretty quickly, but sometimes — like that little relationship I had — things that go off and are really exciting in the short term burn out and fail pretty quickly, too. That could be the case with Hyperliquid. It's certainly worth thinking about if you've got it.
Sky at 71. Polkadot at 71. Tron at 70. BitTensor at 70 — I'd certainly put that one lower if I had done this all myself. Morpho at 70. XRP also getting a 70 — ChatGPT is not the biggest fan of XRP, and the XRP hypers should consider that. Cardano at 70. Mantle at 68. Ondo at 68. Worldcoin at 67. Zcash at 67. Ethena — I actually had the idea to buy that domain specifically back in 2019. I ended up going with Uthena instead, but I thought about naming my site Ethena because it's a good name. Quant and Bitcoin Cash at 65. Aster, Cronos, and Litecoin at 64. Then Render. If you want this full document too, it's in my Skool community — join the Jerry Banfield Family and you'll find it there. Then OKB, BitGet Token, Pi Network, and Dogecoin in the 50s, with WhiteBIT Coin, KuCoin, Audiera, and Pump.fun all coming in at the bottom.
Now let's see the very bottom: HTX DAO — and Pepe actually scores a 16. ChatGPT is hella toxic about Pepe. World Liberty Financial is down here at 32, Shiba Inu down at 40, MemeCore at 46, and Ethereum Classic at 48. To me, these are some of the ones where the danger is urgent and could be real — much less viable than the others over the long term. And I don't see why you'd have a crypto in your portfolio that's not viable for the long term. There's just too much anxiety, too much having to check the price, and it's too much of a distraction to have these in your portfolio.
All together, there are five coins in the S tier, seven in the A tier, 19 in the B tier, 13 in the C tier, three in the D tier, and three in the F tier. My thought is that I only want to hold the top of the S tier — I don't want to hold anything else. Diversification versus specializing in one subject: I'd rather specialize in one subject and get A's repeatedly than take a whole bunch of classes and get A's, B's, C's, D's, and F's across the board. In school I got almost all A's anyway — and it is valuable to learn new things — but for a crypto portfolio, to me the ideal is to find the number one outlier and then not hold anything else. Because as long as you're holding all this other stuff, you're taking on a bunch of additional risk and you're probably costing yourself possible rewards. We shall see who's right about this over time.
Market Caps: Where the Asymmetric Opportunity Is
This document has all the individual research profiles. And to me, the biggest thing here: ICP's market cap is only $1.2 billion. That's tiny compared to the projects it's ranked up there with. Absolutely tiny compared to Ethereum — Ethereum is something like 200 times the market cap. Chainlink, off the top of my head, is at least 20X from where ICP is, if not more than that. Canton, I think, is maybe a little above ICP. Solana, you're probably 50 to 100X off of where ICP is — maybe 80 or 90X. Bitcoin is 1,000X from where ICP is. So these are the best of the best in terms of what should survive, one of them has a tiny market cap, and the rest don't. That's a big outlier. Almost all of these other ones, even towards the top, have bigger market caps than ICP. So to me, that's where the opportunity is.
So then, the verdict: ICP has the strongest 2030 improvement case, and the adoption is the one question mark. And here's the thing — you're often listening to other people and taking their word for it. My website is built on ICP. I'm using AI right now to build a much more advanced version of my website that can start bringing in money, with ICP and Stripe payments directly on my site. I'm using this today because it's so much better than a platform like Shopify or WordPress. WordPress with WooCommerce and Kinsta hosting off the Google Cloud platform — having to have a theme and then put all of that together — is a nightmare. It's expensive. It's complicated. On ICP, you can just build all of this with AI and plug Stripe into it. All we need is for the AI to be able to build in credit card payments too, and then we can even cut Stripe out. So ICP is the strongest case right here.
Ethereum — yes, it has the market cap, conveniently: 200X the market cap of ICP. The tokenomics are much nicer on Ethereum, too. Some of these other coins, like SUI and Hyperliquid, have very ugly tokenomics with the market cap dilution. And you probably already know quite a bit about Ethereum. Chainlink's market cap — really, it's only five times what ICP is? Interesting. But there's still 25% outstanding — still a lot of token dumpage that can come from the inside. Canton is only about four times what ICP is here. And it's interesting to note the research confidence: high confidence in Chainlink, high confidence in Ethereum, high confidence in ICP — and this is based on all the data it's able to pull itself — with medium confidence in Canton and high confidence in Solana. Solana's market cap of $44 billion is way up there — that's 40 times where ICP is at today. Bitcoin, 1,000X from where ICP is at today. Aave is right around the same as ICP. And down here to TON — TON is multiples above ICP, and you've still got a ton of token dumpage coming on that one as well.
Monero, Sui, and XLM
Monero is at seven times what ICP is — nice — and the tokenomics are solid on Monero, though. Sui, look at this one: you've got most of the tokens still locked. That's very problematic when it's bigger than ICP, and it's not technically advanced at all compared to ICP — it's barely a little bit ahead of Ethereum. You can see the full details in the report. The dilution and the market cap on XLM are a problem — I think XLM should be further down this list. And I've done a lot more detail on some of these coins in particular.
Do This Research Yourself
This document is an example of the research you should be doing for yourself. If you're holding coins — and I know most of you are not doing this research — you bought a coin, you watched a couple of videos talking about price pumping and charts, and then you're just letting it sit there, hoping it goes up. What I've learned in investing is that's not a good strategy. Because even if it does go up, you're likely to sell it early, or you're missing better opportunities. To me, those are two of the big things: you don't want to miss better opportunities, and you don't want to waste your time in something that's not the best opportunity. It's like dating — I want to find the best opportunity in dating and not waste my time with other women. There's a certain amount of getting to know somebody, but it's the same thing with investing: I want to invest my money in the best opportunity, and everything else I'd rather stay away from.
So this is what I try to do every day in crypto: I'm cranking out these reports with ChatGPT, I'm trying to make sure my thesis is correct about ICP, and then I'm showing you the results. And if I find something that suggests I've got it all wrong about ICP, I'll immediately present that — because that would be a real clickbait video after everything I've said. This is research you can do yourself with AI today. And it's important to do this research so that whatever you're holding, you ideally have diamond hands for it. You should know it's the real deal. You should know there's no better option. You should know you're in the right position — because then it makes it easy to deal with day-to-day price action, day-to-day narratives, ups and downs, and distractions. This is how I approach things.
If you want to be a part of my community, come join the Jerry Banfield Family — that's where this full research report lives and where you can message me directly.
Thank you for reading. For all my offerings, go to jerrybanfield.com — maybe the new website will be up by the time this goes out, and in the next few days I'm going to start offering a lot of things on there. For more research like this, check out my Crypto Reviews playlist. I hope to see you again soon.